Some people have responded to stories written about Swami Chetanananda. They lived with the self-acclaimed holy man at one time or another. Swami Chetanananda has been teaching the highest truths, he says, for 50 years. Let’s hear some of the voices of those who know him These are vasious people who knew him and who have commenter on past stories about the sadistic Swami.
BDSM and sex were the paths that spoke to him and helped him integrate pain and suffering into his understanding of life, alchemy, and the world. It is, of course, extremely likely that he was also sexually molested frequently by the priests at the church his family frequented.
Sadhvi is his main Henchman. Her real name is Sharon Ward. Theresa Khan is his other main Henchman. Sadhvi has been with Chet since the later ’60s or early ’70s.
Shoemaker had told me when he hired me at the Tao that when he first saw me, he didn’t know if I was a male or a female. At that point in my life, I wanted to be celibate to focus on my spiritual growth. I cut my long hair to a crew cut, wore no makeup, and wore loose clothing even though I was very slight… maybe 105 pounds.Although my sexual assault seems insignificant in the shadow of what others have suffered, I was traumatized.
And he instilled fear in me when he ambushed me. But, looking back and knowing what I know now, domination may have been his reason for raping me…he was fantasizing I was a male.
Rudi died so suddenly that it was a shambles that he took full advantage of. I have personally seen “the letter” Michael claims put him in charge. I can’t vouch for Rudi’s handwriting because I never met Rudi, but it was written on blue airline paper that was so thin it was almost transparent.
Double-sided, hard to read. Rudi was overseas traveling for business at the time. One line in it said, “Michael, you’re the best I have”. There was nothing about taking over or being the successor. It was more of a casual-style letter telling Michael he was doing this and that for the business.
I don’t remember the date, but Michael was already teaching in Bloomington at the time.
The thing is, from my understanding from people there, other teachers were working on their own thing. They had their positions given to them by Rudi, and Michael just decimated everything around him to put himself at the top. This is who he is. First, take and destroy those around him to service his needs and dark impulses. Then cover up the carnage with someone new and discredit whoever just had their lives shattered.
He may have been “the best,” but he’s let his darkness and ego destroy what could have been a real chance to make a difference in people’s lives. He just couldn’t keep his hands out of the cookie jar. And who could possibly imagine how deep and dark that jar was.Anon
The co-opting of Rudi’s position and belongings, the self-appointed ascension to the throne of Guru. Fake it til you make it. And he did fake it. On the backs of the people who were 20-something, in a time of social and cultural change in the 70s.
The Oregonian articles mentioned some cocaine use and prostitutes, but people thought, hey, it was the 80s. Rock on! Adult consenting relationships. They believed the people like Michael, Sharon, Howard, and Theresa.
People they’d known for decades. They wanted to believe it was just the vicissitudes of life.
People come for a while and leave. Some people get too close to the fire and leave upset because he has a new girlfriend. I believe a significant proportion who were nowhere near the inner circle believe this. Maybe I’m wrong, but some of these were good people.
Swami Chetanananda
Read the “literature” about Shoemaker (Leaving Nityananda, Richard Read’s pieces in the Oregonian, testimonials of abuse).
Over and over, he tells his victims, “if you leave me. you will go crazy, be in a mental institution, and never stop the cycle of death and rebirth….. again, classic traumatizing narcissistic cult leader behavior.
That is why so many cult members can’t leave, can’t denounce their leader. They are terrified of what will happen to them on “the outside”. So they stay and accept more and more abuse.
Keep in mind that many “students” of Shoemaker’s have been taken out of his “ashrams” feet first!
In 1997, Oregon case # 970604804, Mandell vs. Shoemaker, was settled out of court for an alleged seven-figure amount (that means millions!), and the court documents were sealed. No public exposure, no scandals, no reputations put on the line, and Shoemaker was not deterred from abusing more of his “students”.Shoemaker was represented by Stephen English. Sharon Ward was also named in the case. English has continued to represent Shoemaker, and no doubt has earned a pretty penny on this type of representation.
Sharon Ward, a devotee with a law degree, who joined Shoemaker in Indiana, married his brother and followed him to Massachusetts, Portland, and Gold Beach. She knows everything that has been discussed and negotiated every settlement and NDA Shoemaker has been involved with. Like many cult members, Ward may be willing to take a bullet for this horrible, abusive, disgusting conman.
As for Portland, I was there. I do know him. Too well, unfortunately, as I’m also one of his victims.
The worst thing about these animals, and I refer to Shoemaker and his posse of hyenas, is the lack of accountability. This is when you see how callous these people are under the fake loving, caring personas. The facade, pretense, and phony presentation on social media of this loving group of people willing to help others, always happy and smiling, fills me with complete fury.
Luring new people in. Promising them the world. Being romantic and charming gets them to lower their defenses and believe they’re in love with him. He is very clever and cunning. And he tells his students he’s a victim of angry, jealous ex-devotees and girlfriends trying to bring him down. It’s been the same story for decades.
I taught Yoga at The Movement Center for three years. What a huge mistake. I saw one of my friends and peers, who was intimate with him, come entirely unhinged and almost die from suicide.
After that, many teachers quit at once, never to return.
I met with someone who has followed him for decades and helps run his center. I wanted to share how disturbed I was by what was happening at the ashram. I was assured that all relationships were consensual, that she had not had sex with Shoemaker (as if that proved that everything was fine), and that any mental health issues experienced by students were their own.
I was once invited to a teacher dinner at his very lavish penthouse at the ashram. He sat on a throne atop a tiger skin rug while teachers sat on the floor. This man is clearly suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder and potentially (and likely) other personality disorders, such as Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD). The harm he has caused, and its echoes, are immeasurable.
I know the mother of one of his victims. The damage and suffering he has caused are devastating. And yet he continues to live in luxury and entice more victims into his circle of influence.
In 2017, one woman walked away from the center in the middle of the night and was found drowned.
Theresa is the sister of the woman who ran away in the night from the Movement Center and was found dead. These sisters had been with Shoemaker for decades. Sharon Ward found the body of the dead sister. Something is not right.
The woman who died had two children, both girls born into this cult. Second-generation cult members like these two girls have much to overcome. The father left the cult. Sounds like some dysfunctional family dynamics.
In 2018, one woman jumped off a bridge breaking the bones in her legs.
Everyone blamed Natasha! She was not to blame. She was another victim in a long line of victims.
She was the only one I knew who had tried to commit suicide, and no one even spoke about it. They said it was just an accident.
She publicly posted her story on Facebook about her experiences with Swami, which opened the flood gates for me. It was at a time when Swami’s Facebook was down because he was likely trying to figure out how to deal with the backlash. But she posted a handful of times and continued to write about her experience to warn others.
Then one day, all of her posts were deleted, and eventually, her Facebook was deleted. She went into hiding to heal, I imagine. I was under the impression that Swami or Sharon might have silenced her with threats of legal action.
In 2019 one woman escaped and was found in a behavioral health unit, and one woman, “with Swamiji’s (aka Shoemaker) blessing,” died after discontinuing her cancer treatments.
The people that remain by his side do so not out of love but out of fear. They’ve accepted their enslavement and conditioning because he’s made them so afraid of the world “out there.”
He preaches to “love life” but lives with his head in his iPad, chatrooms, cocaine, meth, and porn binges, or up his own ass. So while he preaches the virtues of “living a big life,” those on the inside fear ever stepping outside the tiny prison, he has carved out for them in his house and their minds.
He believes that the highest service a woman can offer this world is her total debasement and enslavement to him. And to whore herself out to the poor homeless men in town in his name.
He believes this is the greatest wish of these poor men come true and that this is great compassion to the less fortunate: a woman who (pretends to) want to have sex with them. The blatant disclosure of his own emotional underdevelopment is astounding.
He couldn’t care less how many women’s lives he destroyed to provide homeless men somewhere to cum on for his own thrill. In fact, the younger, more insecure or self-doubting, or under-developed the woman is, the less capable she is of expressing or understanding herself and her needs, the more interested he is in them. The easier to control, abuse, and manipulate – and the easier to discredit when he throws them away.
He just needs somewhere to shove his dick and manipulative delusional claws into so that he can continue feeling important… and this organization has been a front to provide an endless source of these young women for him for decades.
This organization has only ever continued to eat itself from the inside from its inception, a culture that Salami encourages – pitting everyone into ill spirits against each other. If this organization existed for humankind’s good, it would have had a completely different M.O. The fact is they all hate themselves and each other, which is how he likes it.
What about the children born into Shoemaker’s cult. Some children were born or brought into the cult and were groomed through their young lives to accept becoming the sexual partner of the cult leader, Shoemaker.
The tantric teachings describe how a guru can use young consorts sexually to obtain a longer life and other benefits. This has to do with semen flow up the spinal cord and other physiologically as yet unexplained phenomenon.
Becoming this type of sexual partner in some spiritual communities is taught as a great privilege and has unlimited spiritual value. How could children born into Shoemaker’s cult, groomed all their lives, give consent to this type of sexual activity?
The parents of these children were complicit, as were the other cult members. Now that these children are adults and have left the cult, where are their voices? Connie, Liz, and Laura, what do your children have to say? Second-generation cult members have a different perspective on cult life than their parents.
One of his right-hand persons, Sharon Ward, assured the town that they were not bringing an ashram there because the town was concerned about the number of people this would bring and did not want to allow him to move.
She then wrote a letter to everyone in the ashram in Portland. She put it under the doors of everyone telling everyone moving to Gold Beach not to say that they were moving because it is where their guru was moving, but rather that they were simply retiring. As though they sought out Gold Beach and would have moved there had their guru chosen another place. She told people to lie, which is what that truly was.
She is as culpable as he is for manipulating, creating a space for tax fraud, and harming many women by covering, cleaning up, hiding, having documents shredded, etc.
Theresa Khan is also as culpable. She has covered up, lied, manipulated, and aided in tax fraud. Between him and those two, there are many crimes against individuals, terroristic threats made against individuals, fraud, and much more.
Sharon Ward and Gretchen Kreiger have listed a church called Church of Divine Energy to keep this man from paying any taxes.
There are devotees of Shoemaker living in Gold Beach, Oregon, who have been with him since he began his first Ashram in Indiana in the early 1970s.
Sharon Ward, Theresa Khan, and Gretchen Kreiger have supported him and turned a blind eye to these acts. They know full well what is happening. They are present when he “initiates” new young women into his secret sex cult and participates in their rape.
It’s sad that even after leaving to start a new chapter in Gold Beach, he has already had younger devoted students flee after experiencing his abuse. I heard that a woman was strangled until she passed out and was raped while unconscious. After this event, she and her boyfriend, a long-time student by Michaels’s side for years, finally left. They seem to be hiding now and are no longer active on social media.
Students were manipulated to believe that Swami was always in the right and never doing harm. The code of silence runs strong here; many were kept in the dark or told to believe that the accusers were crazy or mental. But it was all bullshit!
He promises spiritual growth, addiction recovery, or healing of a physical ailment. Then he seduces you, being as sweet and romantic as can be. The next thing you know, you’re forced to take drugs and be raped by strangers. No consent. No forewarning. And if you break down and crumble, you’re labeled insane, unhinged, a liar, jealous, and forced out with nothing.
Heather Gail George, and Brenda Siragusa. Andrew and Becky left him a few years ago after Chet had a temper tantrum because mom and dad (Andrew and Becky) would not come with him to Gold Beach, so he took his ball and went home. Faith’s husband’s name is Andrew Sheppard, not Alan.
Moni Oneal, Gretchen and Kristen Kreiger, Laura Santi, Anna Brooke, and Viktor Usov, Winne Spina, Tom Fabrizio, and Patty Slote, Sarah Mocas, Aiden Seraphim, Chris Jackson, Govind and Claudia Henry, Tara and Michael Israel, Kari Gronningsater, Kathy Wyer, Barbara Rabin, Marc Gafni, Rio Hibler, Mary Grace, and Jesse Sweeney.
J. Michael Shoemaker’s enterprise includes brother Bob Shoemaker, Kelly Ponzi, Sharon Ward, Liliana Lopez, Jen Wilhelm, Theresa and Salman Kahn, Jim Brissette, Ruth Knight, Susan Marshal, Maggie Daley, Connie Dyer, Steve Ott, Scott Hanley, Margie Pos, Alexis Sanderson, Howard and Vivina Boster, Heather Green, Karen and Jerry Sutherland, Faith and Alan Shepard, Chris Cartwright and Lisa Hoberg, Dr. Rebecca Reese, Dr. Nathan Bonner, Linda Lack, Michelle Valentino, Marilyn Ritter and on and on.
You Are All Accountable.
I am a white woman made to clean toilets and wash dishes for years. I noticed he went for brown skin at a certain point (perhaps it was a fad?). However, the women he was interested in were predominately well off, talented, and/or connected/genius, not of a certain race (oh and feminine).
He had a long-standing relationship with a black woman.
He had a hard-on for sadistically breaking down strong, socially intelligent, feminine women, especially women with very obvious sexual abuse histories (I did not have that, so I wasn’t his “type”).
I, a poor white woman.. still was publicly groped by Michael at 19 and again a few years later . But he never went further with me because I figured I wasn’t attractive or rich enough or didn’t play the right social cues for him to be turned on by my reactions
He didn’t just go after young Latinas. He didn’t just start doing that when Mariana, Lilliana, etc., came.
He groped me at 19, nearly 10 years before Mariana and Natasa and Liliana came but no further because I was a poor dirtbag girl with bad teeth, and I’m almost sure of that. He sought well-off and or highly talented, pretty women, especially women with abuse histories he could use to manipulate.
However, I SHUDDER to think what he has done to Nepalese women while at his properties in Nepal. Nepal is an impoverished country with a lot of corruption and sexism.
I hope Lilliana can stay away from his clutches because as those of us know, he doesn’t let go easily and keeps you strung out for a long time, probably waiting out the statue of limitations.
He promises a lot of things to his new recruits. Getting into your heart’s deepest desires and dangling them in front of you, training you like a dog to do exactly as he says, when he says it. Then… you meet the real guy.
She was barely legal when she came there to heal from considerable trauma.
Does anyone dare mention that his youngest and last horrifically abused victims are Latina women? By any honest account, Lili is a creative genius, worked like a dog for him, and was promised medical school.
People who merely questioned what was happening and who weren’t his victims were threatened with expulsion onto the streets, career suicide, lawsuits, death (you’ll kill yourself in 3 weeks), and demonic curses. So just for a second, think of what he did to his victims.
I know that there are new women he is currently trying to lure to Gold Beach. He’s playing the same games, being sweet and romantic, and telling the women he’ll “take care of them.”
BE WARNED. Otherwise, you’re next. Ask yourself why everybody is gone, except for the women he’s no longer interested in fucking, and the Crazy Shining Twins, Dr (cough) Jen Wilhelm and Moni Oneal.
Everything about the violent sex the BDSM with students presented in these articles is 100% true. All of it.
His groupies are well trained to spin him into a long-suffering victim of “crazy,” “greedy,” “selfish,” “unhinged”, and “jealous” people that just want to take him down.
Borderline Personality Disorder is his favorite diagnosis which is funny coming from a man who doesn’t believe in psychology and sternly cautions anyone against psychotherapy, stating all mental illness is a form of possession. Of course, he is always given credit for any sickness or injury anyone recovers from, as though it’s a new example of his Christ-like abilities to heal the sick.
Really. If he’s so powerful and capable of such miracles, how do all these women end up going from radiant beams of light teaching a popular yoga class one day to crushing their legs in attempted suicide?
IIf a woman (or man) was supposedly so traumatized, so mentally ill, anyone with a kernel of common sense would not be having sex with them.
I’ve also heard that “the spiritual transmission” that he gives them during sex some people just can’t take, and it drives them mad.
The truth is he preys on the ones with trauma.
A healthy, fully functional, whole, and complete human would never turn him on. So I dare someone to come forward and tell us how his Salami “cured” them of depression or other mental health “tensions”.
He gets off on pain. I know he keeps separate worlds. He has to. He has to have the people that only know him as a spiritual teacher fall in love with all his amazing, well-accomplished, hand-picked followers and leave a retreat with a new sense of purpose.
Hundreds of people were attending courses, donating, and had been friends of his for years. Many of them were far down on the rungs of his hierarchy and stayed because of the practice and the social community.
So many that came for a while and went had no idea what was happening.
A bunch believed he “had consensual relationships with adult women,” which is what his personal, and the company line has always been to anyone who questioned.
Michael has indulged his dark side over decades, and it’s become more extensive and uglier and has now consumed him. He is a hollow man. There is no humanity left. He is a man who has become the demonic force he’s been worshipping for years. He’s gone utterly mad.
If you are out there, and I know you are, and he’s being romantic, and flattering, and telling you how much he can help you — I’m telling you this with the utmost kindness and respect. RUN.
You will lose everything if you don’t.
He has had properties in Katmandu and different places in India.
I am betting there is a lot of human trafficking with under-age people. I know that he took a group of the young women to his home in Katmandu for a “special” treat. Then he attempted to get one of his victims, Laiko Coyle, to convince at least two of the young women to enter into a relationship with them that could “save” their souls.
This meant sexually. He told the young women that there was “no hope” for their parents but that he could save their souls. They looked at him as a father, including Laiko. This is why SO MANY women raised in the cult can’t even talk about it. It traumatized them so much.
He shamed one of those women out of the ashram over the most trivial thing. Then, he had the whole family move out.
Gretchen is Gaslight Personified. How she can look in the mirror and sleep in his bed, pretending they have a marriage relationship when he tells all his girls he hasn’t fucked her in years is beyond sanity.
I always knew something was up with Faith Shepard. Too “good to be true”. Everyone thought that she was “so wonderful”. She was constantly sucking up to Monica and anyone who could get close to her beast to have one or several corroded screws loose.
Pretending to be so mothering and nurturing to these women often starved for some female kindness and taking all their confidences back to the snake pit to “prove her worthiness” and get a seat in the “special circle.”
Shameless social climber. The worst part is she has a daughter of her own. Reading that she was texting this poor traumatized woman and trying to influence her to put the mystery of Gretchen together for me too. These women keep other women gaslit and long confused like,
“He can’t be that bad if Faith or Gretchen believe in him.”
Heather George is one of Chet’s prettiest show ponies, and she loves that status. I wonder about the oaths these health practitioners made, and I hope this is reported as if either Heather George or Jen Wilhelm ever treated any of these victims.
They were, in fact, their patients, and they had a legal obligation to report this abuse. So much toxic feminine. So little sisterhood.
For five decades this man has been “teaching”. 5 decades he has been thrashing about and not caring who gets injured or exploded in the process. How could he ever grow if all he ever knew growing up was the dominance/submission modeled by his parents, his mother’s martyrdom and manipulation strategies, and the deeply internalized sense of unworthiness and rejection he internalized starting from his pre-verbal years in this world.
He is both masochist and sadist and never learned to love or take pity on himself, never received unconditional love from a guiding figure, so of course, he has never known how to genuinely be that for anybody else. He cannot imagine a heaven beyond these pain models inflicted on purpose as a vehicle for learning, so he cannot create it.
In essence, he has partaken in the rape and abuse of his own mother his entire life, projected onto meek, soft, small, or “submissive” women. Contributing full circle to his god-honest genuine human needs never being met, his hunger and desperation never satiated, and assuring that he has only battered and crippled women as his mother going forward for countless lifetimes.
